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The following research project will address the relationship between the elite and popular politics of County Donegal between the years 1775-1801. In order to do this, the thesis will cover a range of county elections between this period, focusing on the role of the elite and lesser interests of Donegal during the county contests and the activeness of the successful representatives in the Irish House of Commons. In relation to the popular politics of Donegal, the study will take into account the popular political associations of the period such as the Volunteers, United Irishmen and Yeomanry and their role and influence at elections upon the county MPs, and whether their activity conformed to the wider context of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Ireland. By extension, the thesis will also take into account other important political issues that will undoubtedly arise, such as the Catholic question in the late eighteenth-century and whether it had any impact in Donegal. Considering the interesting religious and settlement pattern of Donegal (the county had a large Presbyterian population), and the lack of any previous in-depth research of the county’s politics of the eighteenth- century makes Donegal an important study to understand further the relationship between elite and popular politics on a local level. Although there are other county studies that do exist that emphasise the importance of local politics, this thesis will be the first to do so in regards to County Donegal, and will, undoubtedly, contribute greatly to the limited historiography of Donegal politics.

In the 1932 general election, fewer than ten years after independence, Ireland underwent a peaceful and democratic transfer of power, a process that has occurred all too infrequently in post- colonial societies. Within a year, though, the Irish state faced a serious and violent extra-parliamentary threat to its authority by the fascistic group the Blueshirts. This group was more than just a political association; it constituted a distinct community within Irish society that was disputing the evolving nature of the Irish national collective. The Blue shirts ' social relationships, based on the members' . gender and class-based identities, structured the organisation's internal power dynamics and interaction with the wider Irish public. These relationships also constructed collective identities that simultaneously maintained and subverted inter-war Irish gender stereotypes. In order to extend these communal bonds through time and space across Ireland, the group made use of various forms of public exhibition, such as parades and mass meetings, which ritualistically conformed to Irish political cultural norms. These public processions contributed to the construction of the association's imagined identity, which incorporated more than just fascist ideology. The Blueshirts represented a communal fragment of the post-imperial society that was alienated from the emerging national consensus, and were willing to incorporate continental European ideas in pursuit of their post-colonial identity. The emergence of the Blueshirt community, with all of its paradoxes and tensions, was a reaction to the materialist and cultural construction of post-independence Irish national identity. Yet by the time of the organisation's eventual demise in 1936, republican nationalism had become hegemonic within Irish political culture. The Blueshirts, therefore, were the last populist mobilisation of an alternate conceptualisation of Irish nationalism. Understanding its demise reveals the material and discursive processes used by the state to integrate diverse communities into a homogenous and totalising national entity.

This AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award project, in partnership with the National Museums of Northern Ireland, focuses on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archaeology of the historic town of Carrickfergus, County Antrim, primarily derived from excavations undertaken throughout the 1970s by the late Tom Delaney of the Ulster Museum. The demise of Carrickfergus in the early eighteenth century has ensured the remarkable preservation of the town’s post-medieval archaeology, a relatively unique phenomenon in urban archaeological investigations in Northern Ireland. The artefactual and archival record of the town is employed to address the nature of cultural entanglements in late-medieval and early-modern Carrickfergus, investigating the transformation of the settlement from a sixteenth-century garrison to a seventeenth-century mercantile port town engaging with the global commercial world. The Carrickfergus archive is key to understanding the tangible expression of cultural change and continuity in the seventeenth century, particularly during the extension of British control into Ireland. This research is also concerned with tracing the extent of the emerging European consumer economy in the material culture of the town and in placing Carrickfergus in its wider historical context.

This thesis, by examining the attitudes of Catholics who engaged in collective action in Ulster during the years 1848-1867, challenges the prevailing historical consensus that the period between the Famine and the Land War was one in which Catholic Ireland was content within the Union. It documents five key social and political forms of collective action that existed in Catholic Ulster during these years, and the mentalities which such action derived from. The work concludes that, in contrast to those scholars who maintain that nationalism was only imported into the north from the 1880s onwards, its lineal antecedents can be traced back to the years 1848-67 at least, if not much earlier. Moreover, when considering the accumulated forms of collective action in the province during these years it becomes clear that at least some Catholics were not being absorbed into an accommodation with British power; on the contrary, the culture and behaviour of those Ulster Catholics who practiced collective action exhibited a variety of disaffected mentalities which were inherently inimical to the state and, in the case of political forms of organisation such as the Confederates and the Fenians, were explicitly hostile to the British government.

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This dissertation contributes to existing scholarship on contemporary multiculturalism. It does so by exploring how multicultural agendas are operationalised in Northern Ireland – a society divided along sectarian lines. As the political violence of the conflict has receded, Northern Ireland has witnessed unprecedented levels of in-migration. This dissertation seeks to understand how, as Northern Irish society is increasingly being conceived of as culturally diverse, emerging multicultural agendas interact with embedded sectarianism. The empirical research focuses on the political institutions and policies pertaining to Northern Ireland as a whole, and the specific activities and social practices of various ethnically-identified minorities, voluntary organisations and anti-racist movements in selected areas of Belfast. The research involved interviews with civil servants, policy makers, ethnically-identified minorities, voluntary groups and anti-racist activists. This dissertation argues that a government concern for managing cultural diversity can be understood as part of a process of ‘normalising’ Northern Ireland after the conflict. However, a persistent sectarianism complicates, and often impedes, the advancement of multicultural, and particularly anti-racist, agendas. This argument is developed through an exploration of policy and institutional structures, anti-racist campaigns and responses to racialised violence, as well as initiatives that seek to recognise and celebrate cultural diversity. This dissertation shows that the relationship between sectarianism and multiculturalism in post-Agreement Northern Ireland is not unidirectional. Instead, the two processes are deeply imbricated with each other: multicultural initiatives are shaped by sectarianism, and sectarianism persists in emergent multicultural imaginaries. This said, the dissertation suggests that multiculturalism is also capable of disrupting sectarian constructions of space and identity in Northern Ireland. Based on these findings, this dissertation argues that cultural diversity provides an opportunity to denaturalise the social structures and narratives which reproduce sectarianism. It is argued that this process could play an important role in advancing the construction of a socially cohesive and multicultural Northern Ireland.

Cette thèse a pour origine le constat de l’implication forte d’une fraction de la société civile irlandaise, de l’homme de la rue, d’associations politiques militantes, de syndicats mais aussi de l’appareil diplomatique, dans le rapport de force en Palestine, depuis la Guerre des Six jours de 1967, qui soulève l’indignation populaire. Le paroxysme de ce phénomène prend place en Irlande du Nord, où Unionistes et Nationalistes brandissent les drapeaux israéliens et palestiniens, pour témoigner de leur attachement à l’un ou l’autre des acteurs du conflit au Moyen-Orient. Il s’agit ici d’explorer les origines et l’évolution de cette mobilisation, en définissant le contour d’une perspective irlandaise protéiforme sur le conflit israélo-palestinien, qui s’appuie sur un faisceau multiple de lectures domestiques des événements au Moyen-Orient, fondées sur autant d’appréhensions de l’histoire irlandaise. Celles-ci s’épanouissent dans un entremêlement de narrations contradictoires du conflit israélo- palestinien, qui animent le discours politique irlandais autour du débat sur l’identité postcoloniale de l’Irlande. Cet exposé propose une analyse des manifestations de solidarité transnationale avec Israël et la Palestine, que ce soit à l’échelle nationale et supranationale, des partis politiques, ou des syndicats et des associations civiles. Il s’attache à mettre en lumière les facteurs, à la fois historiques, et par là-même ancrés dans l’identité de l’Etat irlandais et de l’Irlande du Nord, mais aussi stratégiques, diplomatiques et religieux, qui participent à une domestication irlandaise du conflit au Moyen-Orient. La récupération politique de ce conflit dans la propagande du militantisme républicain irlandais au début des années 1970, mais aussi dans les discours politiques et au sein de la société civile, ainsi que la réaction pro-israélienne plus récente, qui échappent encore à un apport théorique, constituent le cœur de ce travail de recherche. / The starting-point of the writing of this thesis is the observation of the strong commitment of a layer of Irish civil society – from the man on the street to political parties, associations and trade unions – to the defence of one antagonist or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ever since the Six Day War in 1967, which aroused international indignation. This phenomenon is particularly striking in Northern Ireland, where Israeli and Palestinian flags have been flown by Unionists and Nationalists as signs of solidarity and identification. The purpose of this research is to look into the origins and the evolutions of such expressions of transnational solidarity, by defining the multifaceted Irish approach to the Middle-East question. This approach is based on a prism of domestic readings of the conflict, originating from different conceptions of Irish history. Indeed, the intermingling of the sometimes contradictory readings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict feeds into the Irish political debate, revolving around the supposedly postcolonial identity of Ireland. This thesis develops an analysis of the transnational solidarity in Ireland with Israel and Palestine, be it at a national or supranational level, from political parties, trade unions and civil associations. It endeavours to cast light on the factors which structure the Irish domestication of the conflict in the Middle East, be they historical and connected to the very identity of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, or strategic, diplomatic and religious. The political exploitation of the conflict in Irish republican propaganda from the beginning of the 1970s, bolstered by connections with Palestinian resistance movements, and the more recent pro-Israeli response particularly within Unionism, which have never been analysed together in a comparative way, are at the core of this research.